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

‘Zaza, Elphaba, Tottie and Me’

Most of my knowledge about multiple-personality disorder comes from movies like Sybil, Primal Fear and The Incredible Hulk (which is technically about a double-personality disorder, but you get my point). My pop-culture understanding of what I’m sure in reality is a terrible thing1 is that the personalities are entirely separate from one another, and usually one is more dominant than the other.

Given that, I’ve decided my manager, my friend, my co-executive producer of Tonight’s the Night, and the man who helped map my career with me, Gav Barker, has an alternate-personality disorder. Alternate not multiple because multiple suggests the whole ‘look away from the camera, look back, and suddenly – yikes! – it’s a different person’ disorder. Not the case with Gav. His main personality shares space with all his alternate ones.

His first alternate is Olivia Obvious. She makes me laugh so she’s one of my favourites. If I’m out somewhere with Gav – at a restaurant, say, or just walking along the streets of London or LA – and I say to him, ‘Check out that hot guy over there,’ Gav cannot check out that hot guy over there the way most of us could, should and would.2 Gav can’t give the time-honoured surreptitious glance, or the coy look over the shoulder, or even the peek from behind a magazine. Not if his life depended on it.

Instead, Gav Barker becomes Olivia Obvious. He might as well get up, walk across the room and eyeball the hottie at a three-inch distance from head to toe, including all the fun parts in between, for all the subtlety he has in these situations. Olivia’s tongue might as well hang out as she pants. When Olivia raises her head, I put mine in my hands.

Then there’s the personality that appears most often with me on the phone or via email. Gav will say: ‘You have got to give me an answer to this email right now!’ or ‘This question needs answering immediately because we need to move on this,’ or ‘You must correct this in that statement you made!’ Let me introduce you to Patricia Pedantic. Patricia raises her head an awful lot when I have two or three significant projects running at the same time.

Patricia’s close friend and confidante is Betty Bitchy, who tends to show her side most when Gav’s driving. When someone cuts him up in traffic, Betty Bitchy appears. When someone is moving too slow, Betty takes over. Betty is a machine gun: her words fast and furious, her tongue a lethal weapon.

Alison Angry doesn’t make an appearance very often, which is a good thing, but I can tell when Gav’s about to lose it, and, in my own helpful way, I’ll say, ‘I see Alison’s coming out?’ Calms her down right away. Sometimes, when Gav gets too dogmatic about something and I see Alison in the wings, I’ll say, ‘Why don’t you invite Patricia Pedantic to come out instead?’

This tendency of mine to give nicknames is one that was nurtured when I was growing up in the States, where everyone had one. There was BJ from BJ and the Bear, the Fonz in Happy Days, Bo in The Dukes of Hazzard, Mork3 in Mork and Mindy, Gopher on The Love Boat, Ponch in CHiPs and, by far the father of them all, J. R. in Dallas.

In my family, none of us had a nickname. We weren’t allowed. In fact, my parents were not afraid to chastise anyone who shortened any one of our names: ‘That’s not what we christened him,’ they’d say, and then they’d demand a retraction. This whole purity-of-name notion changed when we stepped off the plane in Chicago. Suddenly, my brother Andrew was Andy to most of his friends and ‘Wee John’ stuck to me.

For different reasons, my gran, Murn, who’d had at least one stroke by the time she first met Kevin, my brother-in-law, in 1980, always called him Gavin.4 She couldn’t get her tongue to say what I’m sure she knew in her head was Kevin. It always came out as ‘Gavin’.

I thought this was hysterical. Remember, I was thirteen. I had a time-honoured duty to fulfil as a younger brother, plus a fascination with nicknames. I called him Gavin too. This, of course, has stuck, and every now and then, in memory of Murn,5 I’ll address Kevin as Gavin. I’m the only one who does, and he always answers.

I give nicknames to everyone I work with and those names often stick well beyond the duration of our working relationship. I labelled one of my J8 dancers from Tonight’s the Night ‘Jennie Fabulous’, and that’s what everyone called her on set. When she joined me on tour, I overheard someone introduce her to the tour crew as ‘Jennie Fabulous’.

On Torchwood, we all had nicknames for each other; I was ‘Jinny Baza’.6 This past summer, I covered for Zoë Ball on her Saturday-morning show on BBC Radio 2 when she was on vacation, and I introduced myself as ‘the Baza’ a couple of times. ‘Jinny’ received a lot of listener texts too.

I have nicknames for my mum and dad now as well. My mum is known fondly around the house as ‘Miriam’. This nickname came about after the first few months of our living in the States. My parents often had a hard time getting people to listen to exactly what they were saying, for their new neighbours were often distracted by their, at that time, very thick Scottish accents. For some reason, whenever my mum would introduce herself as ‘Marion Barrowman’, the person she was meeting always thought she was saying ‘Miriam Barrowman’. The name stuck. She’s ‘Miriam’, and my dad is ‘Faither’ (to be said with aforementioned Glasgow accent) or ‘Big John’, which my mum calls him frequently if both he and I are in the vicinity. This way, she can distinguish who she’s calling for and avoid saying, ‘Wee John’, which I hate.7

One of my favourite nicknames