THE room – well you could hardly call it a room, more like a cupboard – was a dump.
The walls had been painted lime green, probably by someone doing community service for dealing mind-blowing drugs, the sink was clogged with some disgusting discharge.
In one corner, crates of empty lager bottles were stacked up to the ceiling. In another corner, boxes and boxes of Walkers crisps – he half expected Gary Lineker to leap out at any moment - were piled high. There was an odour pervading the air which could best be described as Eau de Stench.
In the middle of the room was a tattered old dentist chair, and hanging on one of the walls, a framed photograph of Tommy Cooper. Hadn't Tommy Cooper died whilst performing?
Joey turned the photograph around. Not the sort of thing you want to see when you are about to make your first appearance as a comic.
It was a talent contest and the social club was nothing special to look at, just a flat-roofed, one-storey building with a fake mahogany bar which stretched the length of the room and a small stage with its cheap looking mic stand plonked down in glorious isolation. Joey was the opening act and therefore the first to use 'the room'. He stared into a filthy rectangle mirror with cracks running from all four corners which distorted his image, making him look like some scary fairground mirror apparition, even uglier than Joey thought he was.
Joey was 32, stood 5ft 4in tall in his bare feet, rotund, with a circular boyish face - some said he looked a bit like Danny de Vito but the Hollywood star wasn't ginger and didn't have freckles. He was petrified at the thought of going on stage and decided the best way to cope was to hide behind an image. He'd chosen the stage name Joe 90 and wore a pair of massive black spectacles, adopting the persona of a character from a 1960s British science-fiction puppet TV series which was one of his granddad's favourite shows.
In the show, Joe 90 gained the abilities of scientists and pilots when wearing his special glasses. Joey hoped that his pair would have a similar effect, turning him into a Frankie Boyle or Jimmy Carr.
He was wearing a light grey cotton suit he'd bought from Burton's in a sale the previous week, a white M & S shirt and a black tie he'd last won at his granddad's funeral eight years ago.
Joey adjusted his tie, took a swig of his Bud and realised he needed a pee. He didn't want to go into the club and use the public toilet there. Ever since he was young, Joey had been obsessed with the idea that he had a small willy. His wife, Sharon, had never made any observations, but there again Sharon never said anything during sex. So whenever possible, he peed in private. He stood on a beer crate and urinated into the sink.
Joey had just zipped up when he heard a voice behind him singing a familiar refrain. It was The Ying Tong Song, a hit for The Goons, an anarchic, loony trio of radio comedians who were the nation's favourites in the 1950s. Joey's granddad had taught him to sing every single word of all their best known tunes. So when Joey turned around to find a wizened old man, wearing a white fishermen's woollen jumper, red braces and a white bobble hat, sitting in the dentist chair he was gobsmacked. The man was sporting a pair of bright red glasses even bigger than Joe 90's massive specs. He was the spitting image of Spike Milligan, the most madcap member of The Goons.
'Can you see me?'
'Yes,' replied a startled Joey.
'Good then I'm here.'
'But you're dead!' gasped Joey.
'How dare you, you swine,' said Milligan who spoke in a slow, precise fashion as if he was giving careful consideration to each and every word, even though he had a lifelong reputation for rattling off zany, off-the-wall comments, 'Yes, this is me, Milligan, Spike, comedian of this parish, well late of this parish, but that's another story.'
'How did you...what are ...?'asked Joey
Milligan took off his woolly hat, scratched his scalp which was bald apa