LITMIR.BIZ

      AS I WRITE this I’m twirling a stainless steel teaspoon up my nostril. I have my reasons for this, which I’ll explain in a minute. Hopefully that will keep you hooked enough to get you through the introduction to this next topic, which is art. If you’re like me, you might struggle to read about art. I know it’s really important and is a big part of everyday life – I mean you can’t even buy a cappuccino these days without it coming with some sort of doodle in your froth – but it’s boring to hear someone go on about it at great length. It’s as dull as someone telling you about their dreams. They say that in reality, dreams only last two to five seconds, so why is it when someone tells you about one they’ve had, it lasts longer than the Harry Potter series? I’ve switched nostril now. It would be a lot easier if I had one of them two-pronged forks so I could do both nostrils at once.

      The art I grew up with wasn’t proper art. Money was too tight to throw away on things that hung on walls or sat on shelves collecting dust. The only art we had was the gear my dad had got off someone down the pub, or ornaments that people had bought us as gifts. I’m not sure any of us really liked what we had; it was just there to fill a space. I’d go to my mates’ houses and they had a lot of the same stuff, as their dads drank in the same pubs as mine. A game of Through the Keyhole would have been impossible on our estate as all the front rooms looked the same. Apart from the fridge magnets. My mam went through a phase of collecting them, but my dad soon got rid, as when you closed the fridge door they’d all fall off. It was like playing a game of Buckaroo every time you had to put the milk back!

      Even though I didn’t grow up around expensive art, and I don’t own any now, I do like art. I just don’t like the pretentiousness that surrounds it. I don’t want a critic telling me WHY I should like the art, and how every glance at some painting ‘will evoke painful visceral experiences with forms that are tactilely appealing’, when to me, it just looked like what the bloke did in my cappuccino froth. But then I’ve never been keen on people telling me what I should enjoy. I’m a big fan of fish and chips, but I won’t bother if I can’t have a cup of tea with them. To me, that’s like Ant without Dec. Recently I was away filming and I’d decided to have fish and chips, but when the waiter came to take the order he said they don’t do tea. The cameraman piped up and said a sommelier he knew had told him that the best drink to have with fish and chips is champagne. I said, ‘What else does he suggest, a martini shaken and not stirred with a bloody Scotch egg!’ Seeing as I didn’t know what else to eat and everyone else had ordered, I took his advice. I wish I hadn’t. It was like sticking Anne Frank in an episode of Cash in the Attic – the two things should never go together. I should have known his mate was talking out of his arse. Since when have you gone in a chippy and they’ve stocked bottles of Cristal next to the cans of Dandelion & Burdock?

      The thing is, there are seven billion people on the planet, we’re not all going to enjoy the same things. I like stuff more when I’ve come across it by accident and without any preconceptions. I found out I liked calamari this way. I actually thought I’d shoved an onion ring in my mouth at the time. And I tried wasabi for the first time thinking it was mushy peas. That gave me a right shock and nearly blew my head off.

      The weird thing is, even though I didn’t enjoy my wasabi experience, the memory has stuck with me more than my enjoyment of the calamari. It’s the same with art. I get something out of the stuff that I don’t like as at least the emotions get going. We like getting wound up. Why else would people watch Jeremy Kyle? It gives us something to moan about. You have to have the bad to enjoy the good. Last night for me dinner I had a garlic Chicken Kiev. I loved it at the time, but now I’m paying for it as I can’t get rid of the smell of garlic out of my nose. I read online that the solution is to stick a stainless steel teaspoon up your nose. So that’s why I’m sat here with cutlery dangling from my nostrils like some sort of human wind chime. It seems to be working. I read that the nose can remember 50,000 scents so I don’t know why it can’t have a go at remembering one of the other 49,999 smells it knows right now! It just goes to show that even my nose goes for remembering the bad things over the good. Thinking about it, I should have some wasabi now. That would clear it.

      ART IN THE MUSEUM

      My trip about art started in New York at the Museum of Modern Art. As much as I like art I don’t like visiting galleries. One of the reasons being the whiteness. I can’t handle it as I have really sensitive eyes. Instead of handing out audio guides, they should hand out sunglasses. I’m not alone with this problem, either. Look around in a gallery and everyone is squinting like Clint Eastwood. I wish they would wallpaper a few walls or use magnolia in places to calm it down a bit. One of the things that put me off the idea of going to heaven, if it exists, is the way it’s always depicted as being really bright white, with everyone wearing bright white robes. It always looks like it would stink of bleach to me. Anyway, it’s not just the white walls that give you a headache in a gallery, there’s also the shiny, squeaking floors! No matter what shoes you wear you can’t avoid causing squeaks. On a busy day it can sound like some sort of dolphin get-together.

      The first thing that grabbed my eye in MoMA was the piece by Andy Warhol. It was the famous one of thirty-two cans of Campbell’s soup which all look the same, apart from the contents of the tin. Vegetable soup, oxtail, tomato, clam chowder, chicken gumbo and loads more. I stood there looking at these for a good ten minutes, not trying to work out what Warhol was trying to say through his work, but just going through which soups in my forty-three years of life I hadn’t tried. I may as well have been stood in Asda doing a food shop. In a way, I think that’s where the art should be really – in everyday spots where normal people go. Post offices would be a brilliant place to show art as the queues take ages to go down. Whenever I have to go and buy stamps, I take a packed lunch, so what better space to show off art? Research says we spend about six months of our life queuing, so why not make it more enjoyable? It seems mad to have all these costly art galleries when there are loads of walls and spaces to fill elsewhere. Damien Hirst’s shark could be displayed at a fishmonger’s. Tracey Emin’s bed could be in Bensons for Beds. If shopping on the high street is dying due to internet shopping, give us another reason to go out and shop.

      I moved on from the tins in the museum and got to a pile of bricks. Normal-sized bricks. No cement. Just bricks laid out five by twelve, two bricks high, 120 in total. Now if this was in a builders’ yard I wouldn’t have stopped and looked, but I was in MoMA and knew this must be serious art. I gawped at it for a good fifteen minutes to try and work out what this was all about. The first thing I noticed was that they were fire bricks, the sort you have in fireplaces and kilns. I knew this as me dad used them when he built a brick BBQ outside our caravan in Wales. After that, everyone went and got one, and the smell of BBQs filled the air every day. I don’t know if there was any truth in it, but there was a story going around that a woman had sat outside her caravan in the sun, wrapped herself up in silver foil to get a tan and ended up cooking herself alive. No one noticed as they thought the smell was just meat from another BBQ. I always think of that story when I see people wrapped up in foil like baked potatoes at the end of the London Marathon.