I was a chemistry student, my days spent boiling, titrating and stirring. But after that night, I formed a double act with a friend, writing jokes and making a radio show, before heading off to Australia …
A
lthough I loved my time at Nottingham University, I didn’t go there with much intention of doing anything with my degree in chemistry afterwards. Not only was it full-on, I wasn’t particularly good at it. In an experiment to examine the incubation of goat’s blood, I accidentally added 10 times too much hydrogen peroxide. Blood shot out of the flask and splattered all over my face like a scene from The Sopranos. I can still hear my professor’s screams.
But that’s OK, because I hadn’t really gone to university to win the Nobel prize, I’d gone to experience the culture of the mid 90s. British dance music – through acts such as Orbital, Leftfield, Underworld, Faithless and the Chemical Brothers – was exploding. Britpop was happening around me: (What’s the Story?) Morning Glory was released the week I went to uni. My entry to this smorgasbord of cool happened when, in our second year, Ant and Dec announced a live show up in town.
No longer known as their aliases PJ and Duncan from Byker Grove, the pair had started presenting CBBC’s The Ant & Dec Show, which featured “Beat The Barber”, in which they’d shave kids’ heads if they lost a multiple choice pop quiz. We assumed the live show would be comedy, and full of ironic students, maybe because around the same time we went to see Robbie Williams on his first ever solo tour – where he played Let Me Entertain You, Angels and a thrash version of Back for Good – and it was full of ironic students. However, Ant and Dec hadn’t really moved away from their pre-pubescent audience. The theatre was full of teenage girls who kept pinching us on the bottom and we were the only people at the bar because everyone else was under age.
