If I try to take Manhattan again, I’ll fail completely. Perfect!
Well, my wife had the baby. I am now a father of four and, as such, have been doing some thinking about how I am going to support them all in the years to come. My problem is, I do not really have a profession. Or, rather, my chronic inability to shimmy up the greasy pole has become a kind of career in itself. I make my money from being a loser.
The trouble with being a professional failure is that my livelihood is dependent on not being able to earn a living. The moment I am perceived to be a success — even if it is just a successful failure — I can no longer plough this furrow. I have chosen a career in which I cannot, by definition, do well. In order to pay the mortgage, I have to remain unemployed.
The only solution is to keep setting myself more and more outlandish goals. For instance, I could write a book about my efforts to represent my country at the 2012 Olympics. Even if I chose a sport in which there are virtually no English competitors — softball, for instance — I would still fail. That way, in the unlikely event of the book becoming a bestseller I could still claim to be a Big Fat Loser.
In this vein, I have decided that my next big project will be to try and take Manhattan. I had a go at this in the mid1990s when I went over there to work for Vanity Fair and was such an abysmal failure that I actually did get a bestselling book out of it. This time round, I will try to do it as a stand-up comedian. My plan is to mount an off-Broadway production of a one-man show in which I instruct audiences in the mysterious art of failing upwards. Now, to give you some idea of just how ambitious this is, take my attempt to perform a similar show in the West End four years ago. On the night of my theatrical debut, I ‘dried’ after five minutes. I simply could not remember what my next line was. I had been warned that if this happened I should walk slowly round the stage in a circle, thereby giving me time to collect my thoughts. But I tried that and it did not work. So I just skipped to the next bit I could remember. This succeeded in digging me out of the hole I was in, but it was only a temporary solution because I had no idea how much I had left out. As I spun through the rest of the material, a little voice in the back of my head was saying, ‘What if you’ve jumped to five minutes before the end? People will be walking out, looking at watches, thinking, ‘Ten minutes? That bit short for a West End show.’ en there is my chronic inability to cope with hecklers. On the press night three days later, a woman in the front row decided it would be amusing to shout out ‘Pulp Fiction’ every 30 seconds. I have no idea why she chose these words, but it was enough to derail me. It was not until she was escorted to the exit by an usher that I managed to get back on track.
Afterwards, the producer intercepted me on the way to the party and told me how to profit from this calamity. ‘OK, if anyone asks, she was a disgruntled actress out for revenge after you gave her a bad review in The Spectator. It’ll make a great diary story.’ Ten minutes later I was repeating this to a gossip columnist from the Daily Mail when Derek Draper, the former Labour party spin doctor, walked past. ‘Oh no, Toby, I’ll tell you who it was,’ he said. ‘It was X from *** News. She hates you ever since you went round telling everyone you could get a blowjob off her for a line of coke.’ The girl from the Mail duly recorded this in her notebook.
So, you see, I am not one of life’s natural performers. Any attempt to stage a similar show in New York, where audiences are far tougher than they are in London, is bound to end in catastrophe. With a bit of luck, it will be such a disaster that I will get another bestseller out of it, not to mention a newspaper column, a documentary and my own chat show on Channel 4.
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