Forget smiling people in Christmas jumpers, Lee Mack’s family album is filled with photos of his mum taking her false teeth out and his dad with a cigarette stuck up his nose – playing for laughs.
So it’s hardly surprising that, at 15 he wanted to be a comic. He says: “At 15, I said in my head, ‘I want to be a comedian,’ but I didn’t know what that meant. It was always the thing I did with my mates. I would make my mates laugh.”
Now 57, for five nights, starting on Monday, Lee will be hosting The 1% Club Rollover. Described as ‘event TV,” this spin-off from the usual ITV quiz show sees the prize pot growing to a life-changing £500K.
Although Lee would never win it – he says his memory is so bad that he can never remember the answers. A great fan of the show, he says: “At the pilot I didn’t get any laughs, as everyone was intrigued by the questions.
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“I thought ‘this is a good format as my jokes are brilliant!’ The questions are researched to within an inch of their lives.”
Endlessly funny, Lee’s life has been a balancing act between comedy and tragedy. He started out as an aspiring jockey, working with Ginger McCain, who trained Grand National winner Red Rum – the first horse Lee ever rode. But, in his inimitable style, he developed a lucrative sideline selling Red Rum’s manure for 50p a bag – declaring it was “good for rhubarb!”
Away from the comedy, he speaks movingly of his brother Darren McKillop’s death in 2014, after taking an overdose of anti-depressants, aged just 47. Speaking on Gyles Brandreth’s Rosebud podcast, he says: “I don’t really like to talk about this. He did take his own life, but it was alcohol connected.”
Of the ‘misadventure’ inquest verdict, he says: “I think that’s a fair assessment of the situation.” According to Lee, his brother and his parents – who were publicans – all died through alcohol abuse. No longer drinking himself, he adds: “When you’re in a pub, you see everything. I saw the parties, I saw the fights in pubs, I saw my dad in very violent situations having to throw people out of pubs. “I’ve seen him dancing on a pool table, the happiest looking man in the world. “So I’ve seen all the gamuts of emotion that come with alcohol.”
Lee stopped drinking after reading Allen Carr’s Easy Way book. He says: “Not the comedian, a different Alan Carr. “I love Alan to bits, the comedian, but I don’t really look at him for my lifestyle choices!” Lee’s wife used the Alan Carr book on quitting smoking, so he read the alcohol one, saying: “I just suddenly for the first time saw alcohol for what it was, and decided I just wasn’t interested.”
The flipside of Lee’s early life was the comedy that came with a family life based around a local boozer on a tough Blackburn estate. He says: “My dad was as close as you can get to being a comedian without being paid for it. It’s like a little stage being behind a bar.”
He also recalls his dad being the spitting image of comedian Bobby Ball. Lee says: “He did have a permanent moustache like Bobby. Because in the 1980s, it was a criminal offence to live in the North and not have a permanent moustache.”
Lee’s uncle remembers Bobby Ball – who played his dad in his sitcom – performing in his parents’ pub, before finding fame. He says: “My uncle said, ‘I remember Cannon and Ball coming because they were just breaking through.’ I like the fact that my fictional dad and my real dad probably did meet.”
Lee’s dad also encouraged his comedic personality. “I can’t remember any serious conversations as a child,” he says. “Everything was brushed under the carpet. Even when they [his parents] split up, I don’t remember a big chat about it. “After my mom died, I went through the photos. There’s far too many where she’s taken her false teeth out to get the laugh for the photograph. There’s a lot of the ones with my dad with a cigarette up his nose, because it’s a funny image, isn’t it?”
Marrying when his dad was 21, Lee is fairly sure his mum was pregnant, but he says: “They seemed very happy. They were party animals.“ But they split up when Lee was 11. His dad was a heavy drinker and he recalls his parents having ferocious rows when they were on holiday in Spain. “They were feisty. It was chaotic. He’d slam the door and walk off,” he says.
“My mum went to bed, woke up the next morning, and very calmly and casually said, ‘go by the pool and see if your dad’s asleep on one of the deck chairs. We’ve got to leave for the plane in a few hours.’ We couldn’t find my dad anywhere near the pool. Turned out he just couldn’t face going back. And he just went. He left and started hitchhiking. He was drunk.
“He told me years later that in the middle of the night, the guys that picked him up stopped in a layby, pulled him over. And he genuinely thought he was going to get killed.” Lee says his dad was more like an older brother. “He wasn’t dad material,” he says. “He was a really nice guy. He was funny. He was a good person. He just didn’t know how to be a dad.“
He recalls telephoning him from Australia, where he went backpacking for a year, saying: “I just said, ‘I just wanted to say hello’. And he said, ‘Well, that’s really good of you to ring me today of all days. I thank you.’ And I said, ‘what do you mean of all days?’ He goes, ‘I’m getting married in three hours.’”
His dad hadn’t told anyone, but Lee continues: “To him getting married is like pancake Tuesday. You know, it’s not a big thing. It’s just another marriage. Yeah, I met the second wife. She was part of my upbringing, but the next two, not at all. They were very quick.”
Outside the chaos of home, Lee’s academic results were failing. He says: “I dug out my school reports. It is literally like a declining graph of academic achievement. It starts off, I’m your textbook, swotty kid, top marks. Then it slowly just goes downhill to the point where, by the time I leave, I just scrape through two O levels.”
His academic decline coincided with moving schools as his parents split-up. He says: “I became the class clown.” With the advent of alternative comedy, thanks to The Young Ones and Ben Elton in the early 1980s, that ‘class clown’ grew up to become a household name. And, of course, his parents loved the anarchic humour. Lee says: “My mum’s favourite programme was Bottom. She loved anarchy.”
A night at The Comedy Store in 1990, with Eddie Izzard as compere and Steve Coogan headlining changed Lee’s life – inspiring him to go to university, where he hoped to be surrounded by people like the kids on TV’s Fame. Instead, he met his wife Tara during Fresher’s Week. Together for 32 years, they have three kids and he says their marriage succeeds as: “The same things make us laugh.”
As for comedy, from the moment he picked up the mic, he knew he’d found the right career. He says: “I remember before I even got to the microphone thinking ‘this is alright, I’m going to do this as a job.’” And while his stage name is Lee Mack, he says: “On my passport is Lee McKillop, my bank account is Lee McKillop. I’m only 5% Lee Mack. I’m 95% not that person. It’s just the one person who occasionally does this act.”
Lee hosts The 1% Club Rollover which is on ITV for five nights nextv week, starting on Monday at 9pm.
