Little Me. Matt Lucas

out.

      And it did. A year after it disappeared, it started to return, thinner than before, yes, but this was definitely progress.

      Then it fell out again.

      The search for a cure began in earnest. I was taken out of school here and there and we’d traipse down to central London on the Tube to meet various specialists. Everyone had an opinion; no one had a solution.

      Mum and Dad always did their best to turn the trips into some kind of treat. I’d be taken to tea in a department store or allowed to look around Hamleys. When we went to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, we would pop in afterwards to Alan Alan’s Magic Spot nearby and I’d choose a Paul Daniels magic trick to take home.

      I was prodded and poked and gazed at with curiosity, but with few conventional medicinal treatments available to us, we started to go down the homeopathic route. A Nigerian family had moved into our road and my brother had become friendly with one of their kids, Azubike (or ‘A-Zed’ for short). His father, having been a doctor in their homeland, was sure he could help and administered some small white pills, which did nothing. Then we bought a few bottles of an elixir made from seaweed, which arrived in the post, and which my dad would rub vigorously into my scalp every evening. After a few weeks we gave up – he had developed a nasty rash on his hands and my hair was still nowhere to be seen.

      On Saturday mornings I started to see a friendly acupuncturist. My dad would sit with me while the acupuncturist stuck needles into me, but that didn’t seem to do anything either. I don’t know anybody who enjoys having needles stuck into them and I was quite relieved when we stopped going.

      I thought little of it at the time, until I was at a party twenty years later, speaking with the wife of another comedian, who was also an acupuncturist. I asked her how business was going and if she had any male clients or just treated women. She explained she worked with both men and women.

      ‘But it’s so intimate,’ I said. ‘Don’t you get embarrassed when you work with the men?’

      She looked at me, puzzled. ‘All therapy has a degree of intimacy, but why would I feel embarrassed?’

      ‘Well,’ I replied, ‘I mean, there you are, sticking needles in someone’s genitalia. That must be weird.’

      ‘Um, that’s . . . not part of acupuncture,’ she said. ‘No, no, of course it’s not.

      No. Ha.’ I changed the subject as swiftly as I could.

      Now, I suspect that’s perhaps not what you were expecting to read. I mean, it’s clearly alarming. Feel free to swear out loud, if you like.

      I’ve tried to process this a little over the years and I’ve come to the conclusion that I simply don’t know whether the therapist was behaving inappropriately or whether he was genuinely trying to find areas on my body that could stimulate hair growth. Like I say in the Preface, life is sometimes about living without the answers.

      What I will say is that I don’t carry any baggage from the experience with the acupuncturist. I know a comedy producer who once told me that he went to a boys’ only public school and had a swimming teacher who would make all the boys stand in a line in the showers with their legs wide open while he slid through them on the ground.

      I asked him if he was traumatised by the incident.

      ‘No,’ he said, ‘I just thought it was a bit odd.’

      Well, that’s what I think of the acupuncture. It was a bit odd. Shall we move on?

      In 1981, I was seven years old. And – apart from that brief period when the hair grew back – I had been bald for a year. It became clear – to me, at least – that nothing had worked because nothing was going to work. My dad said he thought ‘the roots might be dead by now’. And that was that.

      I put my efforts into building a collection of caps, which I would proudly show to anyone who came to the house. Whenever a friend or relative went on holiday they were encouraged to bring me back a cap, as a souvenir. At school, other kids would pull my cap off and run away. Sometimes the wind would blow it off – but that didn’t stop me collecting as many as I could find. I had a box full of them.

      Nowadays if you lose your hair as a child – as a boy, at least – you might not care as much. That’s not to diminish the devastation that childhood (or even adulthood) alopecia can wreak on the individual, but there are lots of bald people you can look up to.

      There’s the Mitchell brothers in EastEnders. You wouldn’t mess with them, especially Phil. He’s properly hard and you can tell this because he speaks really quietly. In drama, the quieter you are, the harder you are. This makes Phil Mitchell a British Don Corleone, and he doesn’t even need to put grapes in his cheeks either. Sorry, Marlon.

      You’ve got Vin Diesel, who is in those Fast & Furious films, and probably lots of other films with explosions in them, but I’ve never actually seen young Vincent in anything, so I’m not the one to ask. But anyway – him.

      Bruce Willis.

      And Demi Moore too, come to think of it (G.I. Jane).

      The Rock. Who isn’t actually a real rock. Although real rocks don’t tend to have hair either, so he is aptly named.

      Gail Porter.

      Me.

      Dara O’Briaiaian.

      Ian Wright Wright Wright.

      And Homer Simpson (virtually).

      There will be more. Go and look on Wikipedia. But don’t forget to come back and read the rest of this book. I tend to get trapped in a Wiki hole when I go there. I was reading about a disaster in a colliery for an hour yesterday.

      Anyway, back when I was lickle, there were FOUR BALD PEOPLE.

      Kojak, the TV detective. I’ve never seen the show. I was too young to watch it. But I know he was bald and he had a lollipop. People used to call me Kojak all the time and say ‘Who loves ya, baby?’

      Yul Brynner from The King and I.

      The bald guy in The Benny Hill Show (whose head Benny used to pat and who was the reason for people constantly patting mine).

      And Duncan Goodhew, who was a swimmer.

      You’d see Duncan on telly all the time. If he wasn’t actually competing in an event, he was being interviewed on Saturday Superstore, or appearing in an advert, or sticking his head through a hole on Game for a Laugh while a blindfolded contestant felt it and had to identify what it was, with hilarious consequences.

      Duncan Goodhew was wonderful. And, encouraged by my parents, I wrote him a letter and sent a photo of my little bald self.

      It wasn’t long before a handwritten reply from Duncan himself arrived on the doormat. ‘Hi Matt! You look great in your photo!’ he told me. Also in the envelope were some badges. My favourite was a bright blue one, with a drawing of Duncan’s grinning face and the caption ‘Bald Is Beautiful’. I wore it every day.

      Whenever my friend Duncan was on TV, someone would ask him how he lost his hair. He had been climbing a tree, he said, and fell out of it. The shock had made his hair fall out. I used to joke that it was my head he landed on, and that’s how I’d lost mine.

      Duncan would talk about how he believed not having hair actually helped him when competing, because it meant he had less resistance in the water.

      Duncan was a winner.

      I’ve never met you, but I love you, Duncan Goodhew. You taught me that being bald was something you could actually use to your advantage. Thank you.

      Being bald has helped me in my career. Would I have had my big break as a baby in Shooting Stars if I had had a full head of hair? My baldness has made me distinctive, yet also allowed me to transform myself. Stick a wig on and I’m someone else. Swap the wig and I’m now another