The Yours Members site has all the latest from the magazine, including exclusive celebrity interviews like this honest and open chat with comedian Alan Carr as he reflects on his childhood ahead of his new autobiographical sitcom...
It’s hard to imagine that Alan Carr wasn’t one of the popular kids at school. While the na- tion is now charmed by the Chatty Man’s quick, tongue-in-cheek wit and self-assuredness, he was singled out by cruel children when he was younger. “I was this gay, goofy, fat, camp kid. I was bullied. I was annoying as a child. I couldn’t imagine why they bullied me,” he tells us with a wry smile.
The Interior Design Masters host, who turns 47 next month, reveals that he enjoyed a “lovely” childhood in Northampton before he hit his teenage years, which saw him strug- gling with his feelings before he came out as gay in the late Eighties. “I had so many friends, and I was the class clown,” he says. “But then, there was that weird twilight, no man’s land, when I went, ‘Oh my God, I’ve started fancying the PE teacher’ or ‘Oh, my best friend makes me feel a bit funny’. Then the girls want to hang around the cool kids and the boys want to play football. They don’t want to talk about Murder She Wrote or Victoria Wood.” Discovering drama helped Alan to find himself and other like-minded souls. “It’s only when I got into drama, I started thinking, ‘Oh, there’s boys like me’,” he says.
Alan got to relive his past in Changing Ends, ITVX’s new sitcom, where he stars as himself in the present day with rising star Oliver Savell as his younger self. Written by Carr and award-winning writer Simon Carlyle, the show documents the Chatty Man’s challenges of growing up in the Eighties as the son of a fourth-division football manager, alongside his journey of sexual awakening and how he learnt to be happy in his own skin. “Growing up, my life wasn’t funny – being this ultra-camp chubby boy with the glasses and teeth grow- ing up in Northampton and your dad is the football manager of the town,” he recalls. “I was telling people this and they were going, ‘That writes itself’. And it doesn’t write itself... it takes four years and then everyone turns it down. It’s taken me forever! But it does feel right.”
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