Back Story Page 0,1

Mitchells that potential Prime Ministers mistake for one of the others? Was it because I was maddened yet driven by a constant sciatic throb that I was able to conceive of sketches and characters that were marginally more amusing than those of people who didn’t end up on TV? Is it the desire to get up and stretch that inspires my trademark panel show ‘rants’? Would I happily exchange all the success for a less problematic spine? Or is my aching back so completely a part of me that, metaphorically bitter and literally twisted though it makes me, I wouldn’t change it if I could? Do I, as Captain Kirk said in Star Trek V, ‘need my pain’?

You will find the answers to all those questions in this book. Indeed in this section. On this very page. In this paragraph. In fact, in two words’ time. It is ‘No.’ To all of them.

I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t BBC Four snap this up? It would make a cracking documentary. Good point. It would be gold dust. Me moaning about my back, pottering around stiffly, interviewing other people about their niggles, talking to specialists, shaking my head with concern as I’m told about the annual man-hours lost nationally, before suddenly putting an anguished hand to a cricked neck. They could even have clips of The Simpsons, for God’s sake. That episode where Homer goes to the chiropractor.

But no, when it comes to celebrities moaning about their problems, they only want to hear about depression and madness. The liberal media have a tremendous bias in favour of disorders of the nervous system’s cerebral centre rather than its provincial offshoots. It’s London-centricity made anatomical and there was no shifting any TV commissioner to the Salford that is my spine.

Yet, let me tell you, back pain is a fascinating topic – as long as it’s your own. It may not be fun to think about, largely because it happens in the context of nagging back pain – it’s like trying to solve an engrossing country house murder while gradually being murdered yourself – but it’s never boring.

That was my situation in 2007. It was really worrying me. I tried everything. By which I mean, I tried some things. You can’t try everything. The world is full of evangelists – people who are convinced the answer lies in acupuncture, chiropractic, osteopathy, physiotherapy, cod liver oil or changing the pocket you keep your wallet in. I tried some remedies, and felt guilty that I wasn’t trying more, but also tired because the condition stopped me sleeping properly. Even Poirot’s little grey cells might have misfired if he was being occasionally bonked on the head by an invisible candlestick as he tried to address the suspects.

I took note of the things that I wanted to hear (such as ‘you can fix it by sitting on a ball’) and not the things I didn’t (such as ‘you might need a major operation’) – like you do when you’re infatuated with someone and can’t yet bring yourself to draw the dispiriting conclusion that they don’t fancy you. That would mean you’d have to start the incredibly unpleasant process of getting over them. In those circumstances – and I feel this gives an insight into the mentality of the stalker – you treasure any sign of affection or kindness and build great castles of reason around them in your mind: how could they possibly have said that, smiled then, noticed this, if they didn’t on some level return your feelings? Meanwhile you ignore the overwhelming body of evidence of their indifference and the fact that they’re often really quite pleasant to a wide range of people without that meaning they’d ever be willing to have sex with them. (More of this later.)

It’s a sign of how deep my despair became, and yet how stubbornly I avoided dealing with the subject via official medical channels because of my weird fear of doctors and hospitals, that I started sitting on a ball – and indeed that I still sit on a ball, that I’m sitting on a ball as I write this. A giant inflatable yoga ball. Apologies if that’s shattered your image of me lounging in a Jacuzzi smoking a cigar while dictating these words to an impatient and topless Hungarian supermodel. But, no, I’m perched alone on a preposterous piece of back-strengthening furniture in my bedroom in Kilburn surrounded by dusty piles of books and old souvenirs from the