Coming Clean

The idea attracted me immediately. Perhaps it was the perversity of the concept that engineered the folly it would eventually become. That I would create a blog where I would be me in everything but name was counter to everything that I was meant to do with a blog. Blogs are about attracting attention to the undiscovered self. They are about promoting ego. This was something else. This was a huge finger directed towards everything else.

At that point, I’d been blogging for over a year and I hadn’t hidden my identity except for a change in surname. I had a real life, thought I might still stand a chance of working in academia (I foolishly thought a Ph.D. from a good university stood for something -- it doesn't!), and I was worried what people might think about my strange new blog, clearly written by a madman. Perhaps I shouldn’t have worried. That first version of me was nominated for two national awards (I lost both). A second blog gave rise to a book which was accepted for publication only for it to be aborted a few weeks before of its arrival in bookshops, these events overlapping with my third blog. That’s when I began to write my fourth major blog – major in the effort it took, not readers. This has never been about having many readers. Just about having a few loyal readers whose company I enjoyed.

I suppose I chose the subject of that blog out of a petty grievance, although not completely. To be Him was to be part of the process that had seen my novel deleted. I was not one of them, so I would become one of them. I would become one of the prime movers. It would be fun, funny, and disruptive. As Tom Waits would say: the three missing dwarves.

And so it began.

At the beginning, it all happened quite quickly. The first thing I noticed was that I was being rapidly accepted onto blogrolls. Everybody wanted to be near Me. They sent Me emails praising Me for my blog. I was the funniest blogger they had ever read. In fact, I was simply the funniest guy on the planet. A huge talent. ‘So much funnier than you are on TV’ they would say. The Guardian found my blog and (knowing what it really was) reviewed it favourably. I was a pick of the week. (Ironically, they also linked to my other blog on the same page but I could never make much of this double success.) More readers dropped by. People emailed me to congratulate me on my blogging success.

Then, slowly, realisation dawned. The number of blogrolls linking to me slowly began to fall. A few angry emails followed. I was no longer such a huge talent. I was no longer the funniest guy on the planet. I was no longer a huge talent. I was, in fact, a rather sad lonely figure, sitting along in a bedsit, amusing (possibly self-abusing) myself, who should get a life or, if possible, die. So they said.

I felt vindicated. Their anger was real, so I didn’t tell them that this was the point I was always trying to make. My satire was never ever directed at the person who everybody assumed I was targeting. Satirising celebrity is tedious, pointless, and, ultimately, self-defeating. Celebrities revel in being satirised. It’s a sign of their success. No, the people I wanted to mock were the people who placed context before content. I’d been inspired by a well known story of an academic who had presented poems to undergraduates, seeing if they could spot the great poems without the name of the author to influence them. I was out to get the British Public. I wanted to expose the hypocrisy of audiences unable to judge talent. These were the people who wanted to be close to Me but only because of what I could do for them. The evidence was there for all to see. And say what they liked, these were the people that lauded me, asked me to read their books, help them get published. Above all else, they demonstrated how we don’t live in a meritocracy. Context is everything and when that context is the BBC, ITV, or Channel 4, talent is assumed. It is a given. The irony is, of course, that moving to satellite TV should been seen as diminishing that talent. And that’s what happened. Viewing figures dropped. Suddenly, the golden couple weren’t so golden. Had they lost it? Of course they hadn’t. In fact, their shows were better than ever. They were more relaxed. They had matured. Yet they failed because the context had changed. Context had given them status. A different context had brought about a change in status.

On the other side of the game were the people who cheered me on. All along there were those that apparently liked what I was doing. They understood the joke and still understand the joke, even if it’s faded somewhat. I continued to write it for them. I worked damned hard to make them smile. But I also worked in a very strange way to improve the reputation of the person I had apparently set out to mock. Yet mockery was never my aim. The lesson one quickly learns when writing satire is that you usually get quite close to the person you attack. I actually began to really like Him. I began to understand what a terrible ordeal celebrity must be for Him. Unable to trust friends, doubting the judgement of every stranger who congratulates you on your latest success: celebrity is lonely. Very, very lonely. From a distance, I watched Stephen Fry accept the 25,000th person to the list of people he follows on Twitter. And I watched people regularly direct comments to him. I see John Cleese doing the same. I have even, somewhat playfully, joined in once (to Cleese). Yet I did so feeling a degree of shame that I was doing the very thing that I had accused others of doing. (Although, in my defence, I would argue that I’m a fan of both because of their content, not context).

Along the way, there were moments I regretted. I fooled a few people who didn’t deserve to be fooled. I felt truly bad about it and still do. Two stand out. One was only fooled for a day and, I think, he has forgiven me. The other I can only hope smiled before he moved on. I sent him two of the funniest emails I’ve ever written. They took me hours to get just right. He replied to the first. It was a brief but wonderfully vulgar and poorly typed reply. As a fan, I’m delighted that he emailed Me. I’m just disappointed that he didn’t email me. He emailed the other me. I got myself out that pickle by replying that I doubted that he was really who he said he was and asking him to stop emailing me. It’s crazy to think back on it. I actually asked (demanded!) that one of my heroes, a man whose books and TV programmes I’ve read, watched and admired since adolescence, should stop emailing me! It was the best moment and the worst of being Him.

The strangest part of this whole game of being Him is that, unwittingly, I think I did some good. He didn’t acknowledge me or the work I was doing except to deny that he was me, that I was him. He didn’t know about the people I’d helped in his name. He wouldn’t know how I’d tutored one person through an English coursework; fixing punctuation, teaching the correct use of the apostrophe, and talking literature (something I’m supposedly far more qualified to do, anyway, and could probably have charged by the hour). He wouldn’t know about the times I’ve helped people track down books, recipes, or whatever it was that they wrote to ask me about. Though I was playing a role, I always knew that it came with a responsibility. Previously, people had expressed contempt towards me (as him). Soon they began to warm to me (as him) or him (although me). I learned to do my best to give the game away whilst being subtle but there were some people who could never see the truth, no matter how blatant. It’s strange to find oneself improving another person’s reputation. My talent, whatever that is, was suddenly his talent. All my work was doing some good for him. The irony – a tragic irony as it turned out – was that he published a book and began to talk about family just as I was losing such an important part of mine.

Which has led to the confusion of tone which needed sorting out. It’s why I’m over here in this old lapsed blog, talking about these things for the first time. It’s not a divorce. As Brit put it: it’s a separation of voices. The people that matter – the people that understood me – already knew. Those of you that come here, come here and learn a bit more about me, should you really wish to know me and not Him. And now you know what’s been going on over there. I feel isolated. I feel exposed. I also know I won’t have many readers and may well lose a good few. Who wants to read me? I’m insignificant in a big way. Just another fool looking to make his way doing the things he loves. I’m not even sure what I’ll do with the other me. Perhaps I’ll add Him to my CV. I’ll probably carry on writing it. Just to see how this separation goes. I’ll be funny and Him over there. Serious, depressing and more like myself over here.

For the record, I have now written four quite substantial blogs. The Spine (631 posts), I rarely update. My Harry Potter pictures are still a huge draw but the political side of blogging no longer interests me. (And too many of the supposedly humorous political blogs are vile and filled with hate, verging on racism and misogyny. I want no part of them, even by association.) I’m also tired of photoshopping images. I could never sell them due to copyright. I might go back and use it as a place to put my cartoons, although the few I’ve published over there have yet to attract any interest.

My second blog, ‘What Ho Proles!’ (135 posts) dwindled but only because it was the genesis of my book. For the moment, it would hurt to go back and write as Murgatroid, though I already have a good idea for a second book. Jacob still gets regular emails from the Conservative Party, who seem to believe that he's real.

‘Chip Dale’s Diary’ (363 posts) was a huge effort to write and I’d like to revisit it. There’s also a book in there, though I suppose Chip and Gabby have now separated given that Lembit has lost his Cheeky Girl. I still get regular emails from people asking about my stripping services. The British Thong Society (another of mine) still attracts regular emails from people (mainly Americans) who are secret lovers of the thong. It has also been listed in various places as a real organisation.

None of my blogs, except The Spine, attracted many readers, yet the word count of all my blogs is probably getting close to a million words. Total earnings for a couple of years of constant blogging: about £150, most of which came from a single commission from ITN for two cartoons. It proves that pictures are worth more than words and that pictures of dogs wearing knickers are worth more than a thousand pages of prose. There are (and were) other blogs, some obviously me, some obviously not. Probably over a dozen. But I’m coming clean about those that matter to me because I just want to have it on record that I did all that work. As I come to the end of 2008 – the worst year in my life – I think it’s time to say: this was all me. I still have many ideas and too little time. Manchester drains my spirits more than I can ever explain, yet I want to still blog and draw, and write some more novels. I want to talk poetry, write poetry; talk about films, write films. Perhaps I’ll do that here. Perhaps I’ll do it for a day or a week, a month or a year. I’ll do it before I’ll go off quietly and begin again; committing another outrage, offending a few more people.