You cannot walk into the bar of the Malmaison hotel in Newcastle without being
transported back to the 1990s. The plush purple and silver interior screams
of the decade that gave us Britpop, the Teletubbies, alcopops, PlayStations
and Dianamania. It was the decade when it was good to be gay, and even
better to be Michael Barrymore.
I am meeting Barrymore here ahead of the Scottish leg of his tour to promote
his new autobiography, Awight Now: Setting the Record Straight, and his role
in Scrooge the Musical, which comes to Aberdeen next month. Physically he is
squashed awkwardly on a low, velvet banquette, but psychologically he fits
right in. The 1990s was his kind of decade. Now he’s hoping he can turn the
clock back and salvage something of a career that is widely assumed to be
history.
“I was apprehensive about how it would all turn out, but it’s been great,” he
says, between mouthfuls of a club sandwich. “It’s a bit like being the new
boy, only with bags of experience. It’s a chance to get back with the public
and to let them see me smiling again.”
At his peak, Barrymore was pulling in television audiences of 13m. Strike It
Lucky, Barrymore and My Kind of People redefined Saturday night and gave him
the national recognition he had always craved. As he says himself, he was
never the funniest joker, the best dancer, the greatest singer or the
cleverest satirist, but by sheer force of personality he established a
chemistry with his audience that made him the most popular light entertainer
of his generation. It’s taken two — Ant and Dec — to fill the gap he left.
In 2003, following the closure after three nights of his one-man West End
show, which was slated by the critics and shunned by the public, he left
Britain — allegedly for good — to make a new life for himself with his
boyfriend, Shaun Davis, in New Zealand. In the previous decade he had
endured bankruptcy, eight periods in rehabilitation for drink, drug and sex
addictions, the death of his once- estranged mother, the acrimonious
break-up of his 20-year marriage to his manager, Cheryl, the dramatic public
announcement that he was gay, an Aids test, the opprobrium of the tabloids,
a false accusation of male rape and the death of a stranger at a party at
his home.
In the flesh, he is an older, greyer version of the airbrushed picture on his
book cover. His 6ft 3in frame is thin, but no longer painfully so, and while
there is none of the manic energy for which he was renowned, there is also
little sign of the mental fragility that was the hallmark of his appearance
on Celebrity Big Brother earlier this year, when he came second to Chantelle
Houghton, but was considered to be on the verge of cracking up.
The problem with meeting Barrymore, having read his book, is that you start to
wonder if somebody whose whole life has been mired in deceit and subterfuge
has any real concept of the truth. He was born Michael Ciaran Parker in
Bermondsey, south London, in 1952. He told the boys at school that his
drunken, unemployable father was a long-distance lorry driver and he
invented comedy routines to deflect attention from the miserable goings-on
at home. He knew from an early age that he was gay, but suppressed it until
his forties, covering up his homosexual flings during his marriage. He
employed every devious trick to hide his substance abuse. Now, clean for
five years, he can call upon a pick-and-mix of therapy mantras to deflect
probing questions.
He pays lip service to the need to take responsibility for his actions, but in
the book he portrays himself as the hero in his own Shakespearian tragedy:
the victim of his childhood, Cheryl, his addictions, the TV bosses, the
press and fate. “God only knows why he made me the way I am,” he writes,
“and only He knows why He chose me to be one of His disciples of laughter.”
He draws on a cigarette and says: “I said to a close friend when I was in
deeply self-pitying mode, ‘Why me?’ and he just said, ‘Why not you?’”
Doesn’t he see that most of the awful things that have befallen him are not
bolts out of the blue, but the direct consequences of choices he has made?
“Maybe it’s naivety,” he says. “I made human errors. I made mistakes, but
that doesn’t make me a bad person.”
The underlying messages of the book are that his life was controlled by others
and that he needed to make everybody else happy at the expense of his own
happiness. “I was giving everything of me and leaving nothing for myself,”
he says, expounding on this. “I was a people-pleaser. I lost me and I lost
any recognition of who I was and what my part in anything was. I got weaker
and weaker and my confidence just went.”
His life, however, was one long, hedonistic whirl. Far from ignoring his own
needs, Barrymore seems to have spent every waking moment thinking about them
and indulging himself, behaving more and more outrageously and getting away
with it. “My affair with the public seemed to have no strings whatsoever;
their love seemed unconditional,” he says.
He has spent “hundreds of thousands of pounds” on therapy. Why did he keep
going back when the repeated two-month stints in rehab were clearly having
no effect? “I think I got a bit addicted to the psychiatry,” he says.
The nadir and the catalyst for recovery came with the death of Stuart Lubbock,
a 31-year-old father of two who was found floating in Barrymore’s swimming
pool at 6am on March 31, 2001.
Barrymore refutes suggestions that he had anything to do with the death. It’s
easy to believe him. He was clearly drunk and stoned at the time and a
thorough police investigation found no evidence against him. The coroner
recorded an open verdict. But he is also at pains to depict the
circumstances surrounding the death as normal. He still thinks there is
nothing odd about going to a club, collecting a bunch of strangers, taking
them home and partying through the night. When Lubbock’s body was found,
Barrymore didn’t even know his name.
The only time in the interview when Barrymore shows any sign of discomfort is
when I mention John Leslie, another star whose career died when sordid but
unproven allegations stuck. Isn’t it part of the problem that Saturday-night
light entertainment is predicated on wholesomeness? Once that goes, can an
entertainer ever recover? “It’s not for me to decide when I go back to
work,” he says. “That’s for the television bosses.”
But the mystery is why, given the amount of misery his fame has brought, he
wants it back at all. “I never needed a drink to go on stage,” he says. “I
needed a drink to come off.” If his bid to restart his career fails, what
will he do? “I don’t know,” he says. “I’m not qualified for anything else.”
Barrymore is not a monster, but he is a narcissist and an exhibitionist, an
impulsive “kidult” who calls himself “a naughty boy”. Ultimately, his
problem may be that television has simply moved on. He says the drugs have
done no permanent damage to his health, but the razor-sharpness that he was
once known for has gone. Devoid of a cultural hinterland (he rarely goes to
the theatre, reads books or even watches television), he lacks concentration
and education. He is an icon of our times. Sadly, it seems, we’re all his
kind of people now.
Awight Now: Setting the Record Straight is published by Simon &
Schuster, £18.99.
Scrooge the Musical plays at His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, Nov 21-Dec 2,
and at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, Jan 29-Feb 10
