Michael McIntyre - Standing Up For Dads

An enormous grin stretches across Michael McIntyre's face as he greets me in his agent’s trendy Soho office. He has every reason to be happy.

He has his own BBC1 show, Comedy Roadshow, and sets out on an enormous tour this autumn, taking in Wembley Arena. Best of all, unlike the troubled comedians of popular stereotype, he has a loving, stable family that both supports and inspires his success.

Daily life in north London with his wife Kitty and children Lucas, three, and Oscar, one, is a constant source of material. His wife’s pregnancy featured heavily on his Live & Laughing DVD (“She made me buy a pregnancy test every month. It was £13.99. I could have got broadband”), as did the boys’ progress through babyhood.

“Now I’m working on a new routine about schools,” the 32-year-old says with trademark public-school-toned glee. “Lucas has started at a very laid-back establishment. No uniforms and they've got a goat. I’ve been imagining what the classes are like: ‘Maths: let’s do a head count. Geography: here’s a map of the school, you are here. History: you’ve just had Maths and Geography...’ ”

Kitty, a former aromatherapist, is his toughest—but most constructive—critic: “She’s the one I listen to most. I always worry about her coming to my shows. She tells me the truth when I don’t want to hear it, like I was speaking too fast and stamping all over my punchlines.”

When they met, Kitty was—breath—his sister’s boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend. The attraction was instant on McIntyre’s part, but it was two years before Kitty agreed to a date.

“Finally, we went to a restaurant and she decided she loved me. I already loved her of course and had eventually ground her down.”

The new relationship coincided with his faltering first steps as a stand-up. “When I originally said I wanted to be a comedian she said ‘Are you sure?’ She actually advised me against it. It was ten years ago this July 1st.”

McIntyre’s progress on the comedy circuit was initially slow as he relied on straight joke-telling that wasn’t quite him. After four years together, he and Kitty set up home. Michael had given up his day job as a runner at a TV company, and cash was scarce.
“I got spectacularly into debt. I was paying train fares with handfuls of five pences retrieved from down the sofa.”

But Kitty stood by her struggling artiste and eventually her faith paid off. A realisation around 2003 that more observational, warm material provided a better comic persona, and McIntyre’s career began to fly. A slot at the Royal Variety Performance in 2006 was followed by appearances on the BBC’s Live At the Apollo, numer­ous panel shows and increasingly big gigs.

McIntyre’s family is no stranger to comic success. His father, Ray Cameron, was a stand-up who became a writer for The Kenny Everett Television Show. McIntyre acknowledges his dad’s influence on one of his best comic assets—that smiley but slightly otherwordly face.

“My father was Canadian, my mum’s parents were Hungarian. When I was born the nurse asked my mother whether my father was Chinese, even though he was in the room at the time.”

But McIntyre’s parents split up when he was seven and his father moved to America, dying suddenly of a heart attack when Michael was 17. Ray never knew his son’s ambitions to be a comedian and McIntyre is unsure how much he influenced his career.

“You can’t nurture comedy. Andre Agassi had a tennis ball above his cot—but I don’t think my dad strapped old comedy albums to my pram. He worked hard and could be intimidating and curt. My experience of him was as a dad, not a writer or comedian. After he left, I didn’t see him very much, so it’s always good to run into people who knew him, like Barry Cryer or Cleo Rocos who say he was hilarious. I’d love him to have seen what I've achieved, but sometimes I wonder if I’d have done it if he was still around. Maybe I wouldn’t have had the confidence.”

Yet the funny gene began to win out early. “I was a weird kid. I only really listened to people so I could riff on it. I even used to do the riffing on my own, pretending I was being interviewed on chat shows.”

McIntyre’s cuddly wit contrasts with the bawdy likes of Russell Brand. But he doesn’t believe his success is a reaction to such comedy. Brand, he thinks, is “funny and intoxicatingly honest” about his life—a trait they share.

“My act is all reality, although I move things around,” he says “I can remember the moments a lot of the stuff in my routines happened. Like waking up my wife when it was her turn for a lie-in and realising you should only do that if it’s snowing or a celebrity has died.”

“When we were on holiday recently,” McIntyre recalls, “Lucas didn’t realise it’s not right to go ‘that man is massive’ when he saw a fat man, but he was just saying what we were all thinking.”

Which is what Lucas’s father does for a living, with his tales of “man drawers”, where dads keep bits of string and disused keys, or the problems of crowded underground trains. “Everyone on the platform is trying to work out where the doors will be when the train stops…”

McIntyre is particularly excited about his autumn tour as it’s on stage that he really comes alive, squealing excitedly, creating waves of merriment. “When you know you’ve got stuff that works and more stuff in the bag, there is no better feeling.”

But touring puts an inevitable strain on family life. “We don’t spend much time together. My wife is exhausted and I do worry about that.”

His parents’ marriage broke up partly because his father was away so much and he’s wary of making the same mistake. “I worked every day from last August until December, sleeping in cars, waking up to do shows, then sleeping again. The kids got used to me not being there, so I’ve tried to cut back. Just leaving the house with children is one of the biggest achievements of my existence. I’m always forgetting a shoe. Why is it sons have one shoe that is very easy to find but one shoe that always hides?”

“Besides, you have to live your life to have something to talk about. I don’t have many jokes about sleeping in the back of cars.”

- Bruce Dessau

Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow is on BBC1 on Saturdays. His UK tour starts in Cardiff on September 21. For details, visit offthekerb.co.uk.

This article first appeared in the May issue of Reader’s Digest magazine. www.rdmag.co.uk

Photo credit: Tim Whitby