Someone appears to be trying to screw me out of money I am owed and that never seems to end well

When I was newly 18 – just a couple of months after my 18th birthday – I tried to kill myself over a girl. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I’ve never regretted it.

But, being a novice at such things, I used drugs – aspirin, paracetamol and codeine. This was a mistake. I had always been shit at Chemistry in school. I always came last in Chemistry, except on one occasion when I came next-to-last. The Chemistry master wrote on my report A fair try and emigrated to New Zealand.

The reason I mention this is that people have always tended to mis-read me. For one thing, they misread nihilism for jollity: a very strange misreading, even if it is occasionally humorous nihilism.

But people (as always) read other people’s thoughts and actions based on their own psychological make-up. This seems to mean that most people think I give a shit.

And they assume that I will calculate consequences in the same way that they would. This is not necessarily true. When I get into a tussle of tiffs. I do calculate consequences, but I may calculate them (from other people’s viewpoints) unexpectedly, in the sense that a scorched earth policy or the Cold War nuclear concept of MAD (mutual assured destruction) does not worry me. I do try to warn people about this, but they seem to ignore the warnings.

They are so used to reading between the lines that they don’t really pay attention to what is actually being said.

If you have, at a point earlier in your life, assumed that you would cease to exist in 60 or 30 or 10 minutes time and if that was an outcome you decided was acceptable – welcome, even – then, trust me, risk calculation later in life may not be on the same measurement scale that other people assume.

The comedian Janey Godley has said of performing comedy: “If I ever stood in a room with 600 people and talked for 15 minutes and nobody laughed, then it’s no worse than having a gun held at your head and I’ve already had that, so it doesn’t really scare me.”

She speaks from experience.

In different circumstances, so do I, though I have never had a gun held at my head. Though there was that unfortunate incident with the young Yugoslav soldier sitting up a tree in a forest outside Titograd.

The fact I genuinely care very little about consequences may also have something to do with having had a Scottish – and Scots Presbyterian – upbringing. The world is full of greys. It is not black and white. But, whereas others may not see a dividing line between the shades of grey I see from my personal viewpoint, I do.

Most decisions and most things in life don’t matter. But, if I decide something DOES matter, then I know where I have drawn that line. One side of that pencil thin line is what is acceptable. On the other side of that pencil thin line is something that is unacceptable under all circumstances.

Up to that line, I am told I am very malleable. If that line is crossed, though, then I will attempt to rip your throat out.

My rule of thumb is three strikes and you are out.

Fuck the consequences.

Just thought I’d mention it…

Now, anyone got any money-making propositions they want to run past me?

Perhaps a job as a risk assessment advisor?

How not to work on famous TV shows and what to do if you want to build a decent career in stand-up comedy

I think it may be my Scots Presbyterian upbringing. When people have screwed or tried to screw me over money, I have always tended to tell them, “Fuck you!” and flounce off. This is not necessarily a good career move.

In my time, I have been nicknamed John ‘Difficult’ Fleming because, when people did not pay me as they had agreed to pay me, I got uppity. They tended to see this as an example of me being difficult. I tended to see them as cunts. Or – if I was feeling wildly generous – as incompetent, unprofessional wankers who deserved to have their throats ripped out.

Frankly, if you are lying in a hospital bed with a broken leg and fractured pelvis having been run over by a truck, it does not really matter if the driver intended to run you over or if it was an accident. The end result is still the same. You have a broken leg and a fractured pelvis.

Call me old-fashioned but, if people don’t pay me as agreed, I take it with much the same good humour as the Russians did when Nazi Germany invaded.

I almost worked on the seminal TV variety/alternative comedy series Saturday Live. Why I did not is an interesting tale of TV bureaucracy.

Although screened on Channel 4, it was produced by the ITV broadcaster London Weekend Television.

Immediately before Saturday Live started, I had worked for LWT on a series of Surprise! Surprise! and, because of previous problems at more than one company, I had a contract which specified I would be paid weekly in arrears.

When I had been working on the series for three weeks and still seen no money, I queried this – I think not unreasonably – with the Wages Dept. I was told:

“Ah! Your contract says Payable weekly in arrears but it doesn’t specify exactly when the first of those weekly payments will be made. Really, if we wanted to make the first of those weekly payments a month after you finished your contract or even in five years time then, provided we paid you weekly from that first payment onwards, you would be being paid as it says in the contract: Weekly in arrears.”

They were logically correct.

So, when I was asked to be a researcher on Saturday Live, I insisted that I had to have a contract in advance of starting work on the show and that it had to specify I would be paid weekly in arrears with the date of the first payment specified in the contract.

LWT felt I was being unreasonable. I felt they were being unreasonable. They refused to give me a contract with any specific date on which I would be paid. I refused to work without one.

So I did not work on Saturday Live.

I later did work with the producer of Saturday Live at Noel Gay Television. After working perfectly happily on several shows, I again left when they would not give me a contract in advance of starting work on a particular pilot show. They thought I was being unreasonable asking for a contract in advance; I disagreed. So I did not produce a Malcolm Hardee pilot called Lose Yer Shirt! It was produced for Channel 4 who rejected it. I have never seen the show, but I’m told that Channel 4 showed good taste.

Yesterday, a young-ish comic I know had to make a work-related decision. In a spirit of up-my-own-arse pomposity, this was my advice…

By and large, there are no right or wrong decisions because, if you take the ‘right’ decision, it can lead to bad consequences and, if you take the ‘wrong’ decision, it can lead to good opportunities. So life is anarchy. Showbiz life is even more anarchic. You can never tell what the ultimate outcome of taking the ‘other’ decision might have been, so you can never know, even in retrospect, if you took the right or wrong decision. You can only guess your best and never look back, only forwards.

I hate to quote that ghastly and utterly wanky Californian saying “Today is the first day of the rest of your life” but, erm, even Californians can get it right sometimes.

After anything you do, you are at the starting point of what happens next not at the end point of what you did before.

So just do what you think is best (with some calculation of the financial cost, as you have to eat!) and then don’t worry about whatever consequences follow as the inevitable and unavoidable result of what you did; it’s the ground zero of whatever you do next – always look forwards not backwards.

And don’t be impulsive.

I always have been and look where it didn’t get me!

Worry away about what you should do right up to the point at which the decision is made. Then it’s in the past. You can’t change your new starting point. You can only change the future not the past. You cannot un-destroy the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Ultimately, you and I are both going to die within this century and, a bit later on, the sun expands and the Earth is totally destroyed. Everything you see around you becomes stardust. We are stardust.

Of course, the alternative to this advice is to suck cock and, ultimately, that might be far better for your career.

I’m surprised no-one’s written a song about it.