I Am What I Am by John Barrowman (white hot kiss .TXT) 📕

do, Scott, Gavin and my family know to leave me alone as much as possible and to let me work my way out of them.

Poor Scott. He felt completely helpless. This incident was the first time that Scott had really seen me felled by something as public as this, something that he couldn’t do anything about to help, and even his mothering and cooking, and hugging and silly jokes, and the smart retorts he imagined writing to the press couldn’t break my ever-blackening mood.8

Gavin tried to throw all kinds of work distractions my way, but none of them made a difference. I was angry at myself for getting into this situation in the first place, that’s a given, but – honestly – what I was most upset with was the blinkered, petty moralizing from folks who had neither seen nor heard the incident first hand, and who were simply responding to second-hand summaries, many of them inaccurate. Plus, can I just write this again – it happened on the radio! No one from the general public saw anything.

By Thursday, I’d crashed, physically and psychologically. I’d completely lost my voice and every part of my body ached. At the last minute, I was forced to cancel my BBC Radio 2 ‘Friday Night is Music Night’ concert.

In the face of dead air on a Friday, Jodie Keane, who’s produced many of my BBC Radio 2 concerts, Joe Bennett and Gav pulled in some favours on my behalf, and they found performers at the eleventh hour. I was in no condition to do anything at that point, and I certainly wasn’t able to phone anyone up to ask them to help out. Jodie very calmly arranged for Sally Ann Triplett, who was my Reno in Anything Goes at the National, Matt Rawle, who was playing Zorro at the time in the West End, Shona Lindsay, who played opposite me in The Phantom of the Opera years ago, and my concert duet partner, Danny Boys, to step up to the mic for me. They performed to my accompaniment as the programme’s host (I sounded a lot like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo).

At the weekend, I had my voice back, but I still wasn’t 100 per cent. I sang ‘What About Us?’ at the Royal Variety Performance – and I sounded like shit.

What did I learn from all this? Other than the obvious about not getting into that situation again, the entire week reminded me that, given my fame and status as an entertainer, certain members of the press, and even a few in the public, will always descend like a pack of wolves on any mistake I make, or flaw or weakness I appear to show. So be it. I will do my very best to limit any opportunities for feeding frenzies in the future. But I also decided that what I will not let a week like this do is make me into something I’m not: straight-laced, inhibited, unambitious and bland.

The consequences of events like these can make performers try to change; can even make them afraid to be themselves anymore. I felt this way for a while in the middle of that debilitating week. Fear can be a heavy anchor in your life if you hang on to it – and it can be heavier still if it’s chained with regret. I’m sorry for what I did, but after I came to grips with myself at the end of that long week, I refused to be weighed down anymore by either one.

Admittedly, all of this was painful enough to live through, but the consequence that affected me most deeply was that the entire incident forced a delay in the announcement of Tonight’s the Night’s commissioning. The day after ‘Ballgate’ broke in the tabloid press, Gav was called in to the BBC and ripped a new one, and, as my manager, he listened, he accepted the reprimand, and then he passed the message along to me, pretty much word for word. This made my depression even deeper – because a dream I’d had since childhood was suddenly threatened.

In the end, a comment from my dad helped me to put the whole episode into perspective, and began to bring me out from under my duvet. On the following Sunday night, when I called my parents to talk to them about what had happened, my dad allowed me to see some humour in the situation.

‘Well, John,’ he said, ‘I guess you won’t be hosting Songs of Praise anytime soon.’

TABLE TALK #5

‘Blame It on the Flip-Flops … and the Harveys’

‘Lick him!’

‘Mum, please get the dogs away from me!’

‘Lick him!’

My mum blamed the flip-flops for my accident. I blamed years of practical jokes, silly games, prank falls and general Barrowman nonsense.

When Andrew, Carole and I were young, it was not unusual after dinner – when the three of us would be doing homework or playing in the living room – for my dad to stumble in from the kitchen, saying, ‘Marion, I’ve cut myself. It’s bad.’

We would all drop what we were doing and gather round him. He’d lift a blood-red hanky from his hand and expose his doubled-over thumb, which would be covered in … tomato sauce. He’d vary the injury. Sometimes it would be his toe, sometimes his knee, but always the wound was presented to us with such award-winningly convincing pain that we never failed to get sucked into the drama. Even when we got old enough to know better, we’d see that bloody hanky and we’d have to peek.

And these fake accidents weren’t staged only for my siblings and me. As I got older, if I was bringing friends home who hadn’t met my dad before, it wasn’t unusual for me to say upfront, ‘Ignore my dad if he falls down. He thinks he’s Dick Van Dyke.’

To this day, Dad plays similar pranks on his grandchildren – and anyone else who happens to be passing. He is always falling downstairs, tripping off kerbs and